Maemo Weekly News for Monday, 10 Jan 2011

Front Page

Nokia's developer story: not there yet

Your editor has long been a proponent of the idea that Nokia's developer offering needs to massively improve if it was to truly compete in the next-generation mobile OS arena. Qt, Qt Developer and cross-platform SDKs are a big step in the right direction. But, as Johan Paul found, there's still some way to go: “I wanted to try Qt 4.7 on my Nokia N8 device so I headed over to Forum Nokia to grab the developer version of Qt 4.7 for Symbian^3. The first thing you notice is that the page already expects some previous Symbian development experience. "The following files will need to be installed:" and a bunch of .sis files. Ok. How? An educated guess is to copy the files over to the phone when it is in mass storage mode and install them on the phone. I'll get back to this in a moment. But just imagine if this would be the way for Apple to distribute beta framework components to their 3rd party developers. I would like the SDK to handle this for me. For example some add-on that I can install for the SDK and it will do the rest for me after I connect the phone. It would, of course, also update the SDK itself.” Hopefully Nokia's SDK team will be aware of these paper-cut level criticisms which mount up to a fairly large stop energy for someone wanting to experiment with a platform.